The Royal Palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso unveils its museography with 47 new paintings

Patrimonio Nacional has reorganised the art gallery of the Royal Palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso in order to enrich the public tour and exhibit 47 new paintings for visitors at La Granja. The result is a better display of the collections of Philip V and Elisabeth Farnese, which include works from Italian Seicento, the Flemish school, and 18th-century paintings and portraits by court painters.

This renovation offers visitors a more coherent discourse in keeping with the 18th-century style of the Palace's historical collections. The President of National Heritage, Ana de la Cueva, has stated that "the opening of the Royal Collections Gallery represents an opportunity for Patrimonio Nacional to reorganise itself and showcase the quality and diversity of the art collections of the Royal Sites, as we have done here at La Granja".

The Curatorial Department has been in charge of executing the project, involving the rearrangement of 150 paintings in 14 rooms on the main floor of the Palace and the transfer of some fifty works between different Royal Sites managed by Patrimonio Nacional. Most of them are from the former gallery of paintings of the Royal Palace of Madrid, but others hail from the Royal Palace of Riofrío, the Royal Palace of El Pardo, the Royal Palace of Aranjuez and from the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial.

The new tour

The specialists in charge of this project, the Curator of Antique Paintings, Carmen García-Frías, and the Curator of 18th-Century Paintings, Javier Jordán de Urríes, are confident that this new tour will enable visitors to contemplate the "great treasures" of the art gallery of Philip V and Elisabeth Farnese "in a more suitable way".

The room-based distribution of the paintings has been executed according to the inventories of the Philip V and Elisabeth Farnese collections. Works from the Romano-Bolognese classicist school of the Italian Seicento are Saint Catherine of Alexandria (Guido Reni, 1606), The Blessing of Saint Gennaro (Andrea Malinconico, 1665) and two copies of Titian by Carlo Maratta: The Bacchanal of the Andrians (1670-80) and Bacchus and Ariadne (1670-80). Representative pieces of Flemish painting from the 16th and 17th centuries have also been transferred, such as The Temptations of Saint Anthony (Francken, 17th century), Two Old Men at Prayer (Matsys, 16th century) and The Moneychanger and his Wife (Reymerswaele, 1538), among others.

The Gallery, the showcase of Patrimonio Nacional

The first exhibition of the Royal Collections Gallery -which will open in the summer of 2023, as announced last Friday by the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños- has led to the implementation of the project to reorganise paintings at La Granja, which had not been reviewed since 2000. The Gallery will serve as a showcase for the Royal Sites and Royal Monasteries, both with regard to their collections and the places themselves, thus increasing their visibility. Moreover, at least one third of the Gallery’s exhibits shall be rotated, and exhibited for a period of one to three years.